KGB Bar

Among the ominous landscapes drawn by FSG authors such as Frank Bill and Amelia Gray, Smith’s hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas fits right in, with its prisons looming over the novel like watchful guards. Opportunity, here in the center of a prison industrial complex, is a chance at catching an escaped convict, while seemingly the only entertainments on offer are rented movies, darts, and boxed wine.read »

Fiction

Review of a Serial Ejaculator: Subway Line 7 and the Antonin Drake Method Winter usually presents the most desperate moments for an exhibitionist. The cold air turns us into exclusive affairs. We linger alone, rush up the stairs apart from our friends, and because it’s always too chilly to stop and talk, we cover our eyes and ears and lips… read »

Chapter Two of “Gone Alaska” Arrival Elfin Cove, Alaska. The Southeast Coast. One month past my eighteenth birthday and I was standing at the forepeak, poised to leap, when the skipper of the purse seiner I’d hitched a ride on from Juneau motioned me back down. “Adam!” the old fisherman yelled, leaving his position at the wheel and coming out… read »

Oh yeah, and I have acid reflux about four times a day, he says. The shrink doesn't note this down, which he finds disrespectful. The acrobats are doing something choreographed now, swinging in tandem and making shapes with their bodies. The clowns are gone. The illusionist stands underneath, though, waving his arms, as if he is controlling the airborne tumblers. Maybe he is.read »

“I know this one guy. He brought a bowie knife to one of those workshops once,” Felix said. “He didn’t say anything, just plopped the knife down, wham, like that on the table and gave it a little twirl, like he was spinning a bottle, like he was waiting to be kissed. Nobody said anything to him after that.” read »

And maybe this will be enough for Vern to expel me. I won’t graduate. I can stay little longer. How pleased Moms will be by this! She’ll never lose me and I’ll never lose her. Because she’s all I got left of him. She’s all I got left of her. read »

Hard Case Crime recently turned 50. The independent publishing house dedicated to all things pulp has published over 50 titles since it opened for business in 2005. And what a business for lovers of crime fiction: HCC not only reissues out of print classics by… read »

Los Angeles. The city of (fallen) angels has lured many crime fiction writers over the years, its truths often stranger than fiction. From Hollywood to Echo Park, L.A. is a siren song of corruption, racial tension, drugs, and silicone implants. Perfect grist for a writer’s… read »

WEEK 1 UNRELIABLE NARRATOR Do you want a reliable narrator? An unreliable narrator? If there is any first-person element to your narration, there’s one answer: all people lie to themselves, all people are unreliable. The question is of degree. While extremely unreliable narrators are fascinating… read »

Interviews

An argument can be made that many of the greatest works of American fiction were forged on the hot end of a harpoon, the weapon that made possible the once nation-shaping, but now extinct, whaling industry on New England’s formidable coast. In Sophronia L. (Folded… read »

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with poet/filmmaker Marc Olmsted (photo left). In our interview we spoke about Marc’s influences, his films, “The Count” and others, as well as filmmaker Kenneth Anger and H.P.Lovecraft. Marc frequently spoke with cohorts William S. Burroughs and Allen… read »

One of my favorite recent reads was Iris Has Free Time, by Iris Smyles. Eclectic, funny, fast-paced and also reflective, there was something on every page I liked and found memorable. I am not alone in my excitement, as many reviewers have chimed in with… read »

It’s the end of the world and Ben H. Winters feels fine. The best-selling author has just released World of Trouble, the final book in his critically-acclaimed Last Policeman trilogy, which documents a young detective’s final days before a giant world-destroying asteroid hits Earth. The… read »

One writer + One focus = One story An occasional look into pivotal moments in writers’ lives. Writing is, in many ways, translating. Author and translator David Unger sees the connection in that both acts require “[t]he transformation of possibly anarchic coded sources to something… read »

Book Reviews

The fifteen stories in The Loss of All Lost Things (Elixir Press) force us to dismantle our understanding of loss, to question what can and cannot be misplaced, to examine failures in fidelity, absences in emotion, lapses in judgment and leaps in behavior all in pursuit of human connection.read »

There is blood on the hands of the American soul. If we are born American citizens, we inherit this stain; but if we begin our lives elsewhere and then choose our American citizenship, we must absorb the stain as a necessary burden. We must prove or disprove through work, destruction, or enlightenment—through choice and action—that, to a point, we are well-suited to our national identity.read »

More than a scare-mongering screed warning of a coming Muslim invasion of Europe, Houellebecq's thorny, hard-to-decipher novel warns of the dangers of modernism, untethered as it is to a larger belief system.read »

"The majority of the characters in these nine stories are dealing with traumas of some sort, whether it be one that occurred long ago or one that happens over the course of their individual story."read »

While Michel’s style is perhaps more closely aligned with the likes of Raymond Carver, his short-shorts call to mind the genius of Lydia Davis, the ability to drop the reader into an unfamiliar environment and wound her before she has time to construct a defense.read »